Gillian Anderson Is in the House

Gillian Anderson is exploring strange new territory again but this time it's not from the otherworld but the Old World.

In her long-awaited comeback to television PBS' Bleak House, airing Sundays at 9 pm/ET Anderson trades in the tailored pantsuits of an FBI agent for the demure Victorian gowns of a 19th-century aristocrat with a checkered past.

The Masterpiece Theatre presentation of Charles Dickens' Bleak House represents a 180-degree turn from The X-Files and the tough, skeptical Scully was far more resilient a character than Bleak's emotional, secretive Lady Dedlock. "She has had to put up a facade over the years, but it's eating away at her," says Anderson. "Eventually, it turned her into quite a cold and self-serving woman."

If you think of Dickens as an author of lovable eccentrics, Bleak House will surprise you, being a dark tale told with whooshing jump cuts and scary music. An evil lawyer named Tulkinghorn is relentlessly pursuing Lady Dedlock's secret so he can humiliate her, all while the fate of three orphans hangs in the balance.

British audiences and critics embraced the six-part miniseries (concluding here Feb. 26) as a "masterpiece" when it aired there last fall. "It's an epic love story that has an incredible amount of suspense and intrigue," says director Justin Chadwick, who gives the credit to his famous leading lady. "Gillian brought such weight and depth to that character," he says. "She can do anything."

She was his top choice for the part, but she turned him down at first. "I didn't want to do television again," says Anderson, who spent nine years on the small screen. Friends in the business finally persuaded her to change her mind.

It didn't hurt that she was then living in England, where the miniseries was shot. "I had always wanted to have a house in London, so I bought one and fixed it up for the first play that I did here [in 2002]," she says. Then she met her second husband, Julian Ozanne, a British filmmaker, and now spends most of her time abroad, along with her daughter from her first marriage, Piper, 11.

Putting on a British accent wasn't much of a challenge, since Anderson grew up in England. When she moved to Michigan at age 11, she was teased for the way she talked. "At first, it was kind of cool because I was from another country," she says. "But the other kids just couldn't understand me."

British actor Charles Dance, who plays Tulkinghorn, now counts himself among her biggest fans. "As good as The X-Files was, she's a much better actress than her work on that series would have you believe," he says. "She's fun to be with, but she goes about her business and takes her work very seriously."

The success, though, has come at a price for the publicity-averse Anderson. "I used to be able to walk around the city quite incognito," she says. "All of a sudden I'm getting even more recognized than I was before." Piper, however, is unfazed by her mother's notoriety. "She'll ask me how things went at work and how a scene went if she knows it's difficult, but the conversation is not about me being famous," Anderson says. Piper has happily indulged, though, in at least one perk of fame: going to the latest Harry Potter premiere.

So what would Scully think of Lady Dedlock's predicament? "I think she'd probably be frustrated by her and want her to just f--- the aristocracy!" she says. "Just tell the truth."